My philosophy for creating B2B brands
One day my life changed. It was the summer of 2003. I got a phone call from Chris Wall, the ECD of IBM at Ogilvy. Chris had done a lot of famous technology work for Apple at BBDO and had authored one of the biggest brand turnarounds in advertising history for Lou Gerster at IBM. He put the brand #2 in the world behind Coke with his advertising. His work dripped with empathy. He turned a dying hardware company into an innovative tech giant that was leading the way to wherever the world was going with nothing but words and images and film. I knew the work well because I was working for HP, one of IBM's big competitors at the time. He told me he saw a Wall Street Journal series I had done for HP's R&D labs and was impressed by what I had written and he offered me a job to come work for him on IBM. I felt like I had been called up to the majors. What I learned from him over the next 15 years made me re-think everything I thought I knew about advertising and brand building, what it was and how to do it.
B2B and technology brands are much more complex than consumer brands. The buying process is much longer. The consequences of the decision to buy much greater. Careers are on the line. Millions of dollars are often at stake. A lot of people try to "dumb down" the complexity and think of something clever or funny that will "cut through" the noise of the modern media environment. But that trivializes the offering. The key to me is distilling the complexity down to something simple without trivializing it. Boiling the essence of the selling point down to a memorable handle that celebrates and encompasses the complexity but creates a framework for all of the products, offerings and divisions of a complex company to ladder up to.
It's easier to see in an example.
IBM: Let's build a smarter planet. IBM sells hardware, software, consulting services, custom solutions to companies big and small and governments. Let's build a smarter planet boils down everything they sell into the idea that technology can make everything smarter.
Workday: for a changing world. The idea that the reason the company exists, the idea for why anyone would buy their HR and Finance software is because that software is built to help companies adapt to change and change is a thing that is unpredictable. The idea of building to help people adapt to change is why every employee comes to work in the morning and guides and informs everything they do and everything they sell.
Circle: the new shape of money. What will money be in the future? Where will it go? How will it relate to the currencies we use today? How will it work? How will it be regulated? How will it be protected? How will it be used? These are all questions Jeremy Allaire's Circle is asking as it builds out the world's most robust USD stable-coin. How do you distill that down to an enduring idea? Their name is circle. Circle is a shape. Shapes are fundamental to math, geometry, trigenometry, calculus. Shapes are the building blocks children use as their brains are developing and growing. How about Circle: the new shape of money?
I think a great B2B brand is defined by a theme that is a distillation of their point of view of the world. Their reason for being. Their argument for "why them" vs "why someone else". And that point of view is then brought to the world in both very quick expressions (airport, digital, iconography, logos, SWAG) and also very deep expressions (long copy, website explanatory pages, speeches, events, keynotes, white papers, articles). The trick to branding is to get the combination of these two things right in tandem. The quick branding is about creating a sense of PRESENCE (the perception that everyone is working with your brand) and the deeper work creates a sense of SUBSTANCE (the depth of the argument when you have time to lay it out). Understanding the interrelatedness of these two dynamics is the key to building a brand out in the world. A lot of agencies get this wrong, they try to only do the presence work or they stuff the presence work full of copy no one can read or they do little presence work at all. I learned this working on IBM for a decade in the 2000s and have applied the base thinking to many brands I'vw worked on since both big and small.
Another point of building great B2B brands is tapping into the underlying emotion inherent in them. A lof of people think B2B brands are boring and technical, but most of the time they're about things that make other things work. Platforms that empower large groups of people to do what they do every day. There is an incredible amount of emotion there that can be used in advertising to show people that you understand their world and empathize with them.
And finally, I also look for ideas that will endure over time. A great idea builds on itself but needs time to build up steam. Clever ad campaigns come and go but when you hit on a big idea and stick with it for a few years it builds on itself over time. The key is to constantly imbue it with meaning and refresh the creative off of the big idea to keep it current and react to whatever is going on in market. I tend to think of a 5 year arc for a typical idea but some have been so successful that they've gone on well beyond that. "The best run businesses run SAP" ran for 10 years, for instance. "Smarter planet" for IBM was an 8 year idea. "CDW: People who get IT" was a ten year idea. There's no set amount of time for a big idea the point is to think long term about building it instead of short term.
So, to summarize...
Simplify without trivializing.
Distillation of POV.
Tapping into underlying emotion.
The twin forces of presence and Substance.
If I could boil my philosophy of B2B brand building down to something it would probably be to that.
Rob Jamieson
January 2, 2024